Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Cognitive Science Principles Meet AI-Hard Problems

Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium

Artificial intelligence and cognitive science have always been overlapping disciplines. Early in their history, that overlap was considerable. However, the two disciplines have increasingly diverged under seemingly incompatible constraints. The difficulty of many problems tackled by AI led it to adopt brute-force or domain-specific solutions that arguably were not cognitively plausible. Conversely, the need for precision and reproducibility increasingly led cognitive science to focus on experimental paradigms that AI did not recognize as hard problems.

This symposium explored what each discipline can expect to contribute to the other in the relatively near future. More specifically, it asked whether cognitive science approaches can be applicable to AI-hard problems. Conversely, what impact can the challenges of AI-hard problems and the techniques that have been applied to solve them have on cognitive science?